


Till the End

by Caepio



Category: Norse Religion & Lore, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:24:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caepio/pseuds/Caepio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Identity is a complex thing, brittle and cracking like a stone under great pressure. Loki was never just one person.<br/>Loki/Stark in later chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

For S.

__________

 

_One did I see_

_In the wet woods bound,_

_A lover of ill,_

_And to Loki like;_

_Would you yet know more?_

 

When he came, Loki just laughed. Chained to a rock, his face cut with livid lines where the serpent’s poison had touched his skin, he just laughed, the sound hollow and echoing, ringing in Thor’s head. The dark red of the entrail-chains that bound him were stark against his skin - pale and nearly dead. Hundreds of years since he’d seen the sun and felt it’s warmth. What did that matter to Loki, though? He just laughed. Laughed at the hundreds of years. Laughed at the poison. Laughed at the look in Thor’s eyes. Mocked the look in Thor’s eyes.

  
_Your fault Þórr Einriði. Your fault. Don’t stand there staring - say your piece and leave._

  
Loki’s voice was a slicing, icy coldness, his laughter breaking, tearing into screams that strained the highest regions of his voice as another clear and burning drop of poison ate a pathway down his skin. And still he laughed. Never even in his screams fully stopping. He hurt. And it was Thor who felt the pain, feeling the poison pouring out through wordless sound and burning Thor’s mind. It translated into Thor’s being, pounding through him with the laughing face of Loki - recognizable even beneath the fresh scars of the poison of Skaði’s serpent.

  
_Come now Þórr Hlóriði! Surely you can speak- comment on your work... Comment on my punishm-_

  
And this time when his voice broke it was a soundless scream, his body arching against the bonds that chained him, the movement cracking the stone beneath him, infinitesimal fissures that spread out and out- but not enough. It would only be enough at Ragnarök - then the stone would break, then the stars would fall, the Bifröst crack, and the sons of Muspell bring the world to ashes and fire.

  
Miðgard would tremble with the force of Loki’s agony- but this chamber was still. The tension spreading down, through the stone, deep, deep down through Yggdrasil’s branches to reach the other worlds.  
Thor left without a word. Running from the sound more than the sight. Running from something that it soon became apparent existed more in his mind than it ever had in voice. That was the danger of Loki silver-tongue. It was never the sound- it was how the meaning stuck in the soul. He should never have gone.  
 _Your fault_. It wasn’t. Not totally. Thor reminded himself of this again and again - Loki had finally gone too far. It was Loki who broken the faith of the Aesir. Loki who had fled. Loki who had changed himself into the salmon - caught in the rapids between the warriors and the ocean. Caught in a net held by Thor. Loki the clever one - who never got into so much trouble he couldn’t squirm his way out - tied down with the entrails of his own son, locked to a stone until the end of the world.

  
The stories never showed that though. They spoke of it as something to come, something that was not yet. They didn’t talk about the silence of Asgard without the jotunn. Loki had been Thor’s companion in his adventures - now, that was no more. The snow was heavy on the pine trees, thick fallen on the ground, and there was no flash of a deep green cloak and strange pale features leaping up from behind a snow drift with some new scheme in hand. The ground was barren of a white mare’s foot prints - followed by its 8 legged child. And Loki was chained to the earth, bound the shapeshifter, flightless the hawk.

  
Leaving the chamber, Thor did not look back, letting the upper world wrap itself around him again, trying to shake the sound of Loki’s voice from his thoughts. The screams had barely seemed real to his ears, the pain was all that was recalled, a memory he’d sooner forget. Refusing to cast a last glance back, he did not turn to see the shadows shift in the cave, pale features warping and forming as bright, burning, ouroboros eyes watched him go, the form on the stone locked down in its pain, helpless and speechless, the laughter born of the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

Loki’s room was like a magpie’s nest. Strange objects looked out from the gaps between the books in the shelves - stacked helter-skelter in no discernible order. The bed was unmade - blankets and soft furs tumbled from fitful nights. Dozens of half melted candles in twisting iron holders scattered the flat surfaces in the room, a half eaten apple sat on the stone window sill.

Thor didn’t know why no one had bothered to clear the room after Loki had been imprisoned, perhaps no one had liked to get too close. The room did have a strange feeling.... He stepped farther into the room, caught sight of a motion out of the corner of his eye and whipped around, hand dropping to Mjölnir at his belt, to be confronted with - nothing. Just a reflection - his reflection - in a tiny mirror leaning against the side of a shelf, just a glimmer of an image in a gilded frame, nothing more. The room was unsettling. The woven carpet on the floor had no discernible pattern and went on and on in a tangle of chords, each one eating into the other till it disappeared beneath the carved wood of the bedstead. There were numerous disquieting objects in the room, a long braided coil of golden hair was tumbling out of an open drawer at the desk, a long line of eagle’s feathers, bound to a leather chord stained with drops of blood, hung from the bed post, trailing down to touch the blankets. Thor reached out a hand and caught a feather between his fingers, the edges singed and ashen.

There were mistletoe leaves, and the fletching of an arrow lying undisturbed on the desk, Loki’s knife next to them, his last, finished work. The room still felt like Loki. Like Thor was trespassing and any second the Jǫtunn would walk into the room, hair tumbling loosely down to his shoulders like a fox’s pelt, his gaze unnervingly fixed on Thor’s own - disconcerting, disapproving, even angry, and amused already at what he had not yet done to make Thor regret trespassing. All this without saying a word. Thor could practically feel that look just standing there and he hurriedly set down the arrow fletching that he’d curiously picked up, throwing a last hasty glance around the room before turning tail and fleeing.

He came back again though. And again. Loki’s voice still ringing in his thoughts felt less like insanity when he was there. The feeling of Loki’s presence strong enough that he could pretend the formless voice to be real, to be something he could converse with, something that wasn’t harrowed with pain and mad laughter. Loki was in this room as he’d used to be, separate and distinct from the being who’s features had been burned with serpent’s poison.

The room was no more strange than the rest of Asgard, he decided. Everything there had grown hazy, of the past not the present. Winter had come again - snows falling heavy on the ground, blanketing the trees. The fires in the great hall died sooner, their heat not enough to warm, and there were no new stories to be told. Those they had used to take joy from were fading, details forgotten no matter how often they were retold. Loki silvertongue was gone. And what they thought has been a blessing - the loss of his memory which could curse with past faults just as easily as praise - had taken part of their identity. Odin knew all things but he could not speak all things. So Thor went to Loki’s rooms and stared at the great, woven expanse of the carpet, seeing runes and shapes in it if he looked long enough, woven into each successive coil. He wasn’t sure if this was all that was left of Loki. A recorded story that fed into itself in an endless circle, no new threads now to feed into it. Loki’s fate had sealed his end before it had happened, and with it, his identity.

For himself, Thor knew that whatever might become of him, thunder would remain, storms, and a good harvest after. He lived in those things. And even when Jormungandr took him, Thor would still be. Þórr Hlóriði, Þórr Sönnungr would continue. Identity without manifestation. What was Loki though? Where did he still exist? Did he still exist? The form he had seen tied to the stone had not felt like Loki.


	3. Chapter 3

The fire is burning low, the darkened hall nothing but shadows around Thor. It’s been too long since he’s seen much else in this hall. And the last time - he doubted anyone could forget that. He hadn’t been there at the beginning, but he’d heard how Loki had found a way into the feast, ignoring the gate keeper’s protests. He’d stood in the middle of the hall, before the high table, his words cutting at anyone who spoke with him, either to calm or provoke. He’d mocked Bragi, his lips twisted in a smile at the man’s threats, and the protests of the gods. Anyone who interrupted him had their words thrown back at them, secrets spilling from Loki’s lips in a fast rhythm, his hatred burning anyone who tried to stem the contempt pouring from him like blood from so many wounds. Loki hadn’t spared anyone from his truth telling, even himself.

Thor’s coming was late, by then the hall was silent, anger hard in the Aesir’s eyes but silenced with humiliation, Loki’s last, self-destructive, statement still ringing in the silence. Only Loki was laughing, high, hawk shrieks that broke against the walls.

The fires in the hall had burned brightly that night, reflecting back from the great shields on the wall, throwing the Aesir’s shadows against the walls and across the floor like painted images of themselves. Loki had his arm around Sif’s waist, holding her against him like it meant something or once had. He looked up when Thor came in, bright, unsettling eyes meeting Thor’s over Sif’s shoulder, with a slow, mocking smile. Sif wrenched herself away from Loki at the sound of her husband’s voice, retreating back to her place at the table.

Loki, always lying, always trying squirm his way out of another injury didn’t move, didn’t even try to dodge Thor’s fist. He fell back against the floor, skidding across the hard stone, and even then he’d kept laughing. Laughed at each of Thor’s threats, as if they didn’t matter, as if there was something that would keep Thor from killing him no matter what Loki did. So he’d mocked Thor in turn, mocked him with his own fate as if he had as sure knowledge of it as Frigga, mocked him with the past he’d shared with Thor.

There was blood dripping down from the corner of his mouth, as if the old wounds of the dwarves had been reopened at Thor’s blow. Loki wiped it away with the back of his hand, staring at it as if he’d never been injured like that before, never seen his own blood, and then he’d abruptly pulled himself to his feet from where Thor had thrown him, stalking from the hall. He’d paused though, in the doorway, on the edge of the hall’s firelight, “I don’t think there’s anything left - you’ve all heard what I wanted to say.” His lips twisted in a slight smile, “I know your threats carry pain, so for you, Sonnungr, I’ll leave-” He gave a mocking, half bow to Thor and straightened, starting to turn to go but tossing back over his shoulder, “Never again, Ægir, will you take the same joy in your feasts. As for this hall? And all that’s inside it? Let fire play over them.”

There had been no seidr in his words, but they were true. Maybe Loki’s fate had finally grabbed him, tripping up his own cleverness and giving his madness a sense. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he wanted to - his destructive anger had finally eaten through everyone else till there was no one left but him.

Thor never heard Loki speak again after that. He was caught and tied to a rock with Skadi’s serpent above him, he wasn’t to be free again till he came to make good on his final words. And now, Thor sits in the darkened hall, and Loki’s promised lack of mirth continues to hold.

The coals are almost all that’s left of the fire, Thor stirs them up, watching the dull burst of light that shoots up across the walls, the shadows dancing and flickering before settling into gloom again. He feels tired. Tired and old, as if Idunn’s apples had lost their affect. The light in the hall is barely enough to see by anymore, a dead coldness spreading. He feels the touch of cool fingers against the back of his neck, sliding up to twine through his hair, the soft press of the pads of someone’s thumbs against the corner of his jaw. Jotunn coldness and slim Aesir fingers. Loki’s hands. They slide through his hair, braiding it loosely, he can feel the gentle tug as each lock is pulled into place. His eyes are falling closed, breath slowing, relaxing into the familiar touch - Two hundred years of banished imprisonment… That is not so long, is it? Loki was never really gone… Terrible though the punishment was, Loki had deserved it for what he’d done… The oath breaking things he’d done- _What had he done?_ The fire’s nothing but dying embers, past the point where anything could be relit… Thor’s head is heavy, he’s half asleep… He feels the weight of his braided hair slide over his shoulder- He jerks awake.

The fire is crackling along the dry, pine wood logs that were just thrown onto it, the coals sparking up readily to light them, the hall is burning with all the brightness of burnished gold. There’s someone on the floor by his chair, leaning against his leg, one, warm arm casually thrown across his knees, watching the fire he’d restarted.

“When did you get here?” Thor murmurs, staring at him, feeling barely awake.

Bright, unsettling eyes look up at him, raising an eyebrow in question, “What do you mean, brother?” Loki smiles in amusement at Thor’s forgetfulness, long dark hair falling across his cheek, half hiding his expression, “I’ve been here this whole time.”


End file.
